Couch Potato Chronicles: Truth or Dare, Winchester Style

Once is a fluke.  Twice is a coincidence.  Three times is a pattern.  And this pattern is a great one.  We just got our third excellent "Supernatural" episode in a row, and as the lovely La Parisienne just said, "Our boys are back!"  Oh, and welcome back, darlings!  (Plus Castiel, whose first appearance this season was very welcome indeed.)  Dare I say that the show has recovered itself?  Here's a bit of everyone's favorite trench coat-wearing angel as he appeared tonight:

Overall for the episode?  From the instant the title appeared, hopes were high for a good episode.  Come on, with a title like "You Can't Handle the Truth" for a story about a curse that makes people engage in total brutal unwilling honesty?  The show's recovered its sense of humor and pop culture savvy.  Even better, the storytelling was both engaging and entertaining on all its different registers from its throwaway bits of hilarity (Bobby oversharing on the phone ... and Dean's response) to its development of the narrative arc of Sam's troubling behavior and Dean's increasing concern about his brother, even in the middle of being forced to tell the unvarnished truth about himself -- or, at least, his own self-perception.  (I did tell La Parisienne that I had never loved Dean as much as I did right then.)  As for Sam ... The signs were there from last week that he is not all right, that there is something profoundly and disturbingly wrong with him, and this week's episode developed this rather well, all the way through his bizarre ability to lie, right now to the zinger at episode's end.

As for Dean himself, I was wary that his character would degenerate into the sort of previous impotent moping that I so hated ... but I needn't have worried.  This time around, he may be ridden with his own psychological torments, but somehow it's all right.  "Poor sad Dean," we ladies said, and then watched him beat his monster to a pulp with a grim determination.  I for one can't wait until the next episode.